Kevan Parsley - Organizer of Sarnia's Walking Soccer Program
Kevan Parsley is the organizer of Sarnia’s Walking Soccer program. Kevan has been a lifelong soccer player who has found his chance to play again after hanging up his boots. He shared his experiences with walking soccer with us so far.
On his introduction to walking soccer and starting up in Sarnia...
I went to the UK, where I’m originally from, and two friends asked me if I wanted to play walking soccer. I had been playing soccer all my life, but said no as I wasn’t interested. I ended up going just to watch, but as soon as I started watching them play, I was hooked. The next week they were playing again, but I didn’t have any shorts, so I went out and bought a pair of shorts and played. I thought, I’ve got to get this going in Canada, and so the following year I did. I contacted people I had played with locally in Sarnia’s industrial league, and anybody I thought would be interested in playing. Gradually, it got going and the city of Sarnia gave us permission to play outdoors before it got too cold.
On starting to play indoor throughout the winter...
We started the program, but didn’t play in the winter. This is the first season we’ve played indoors because of COVID, lots of people going south or on vacation in the winter. We didn’t have the numbers, but we tried again and there were quite a few players interested and we pushed to get a location. I’m really glad we did it because it’s really going well indoors. We open the doors, and it’s almost like we’re in a different world – everybody’s happy and talking.
Depending on the season we play indoors or outdoors. Indoors the field is a lot smaller, like the size of a basketball court, but outdoors we use half the length of a full-size field. Depending on the numbers we adjust the size of the field. We usually get on average 14 players, but we’ve seen larger numbers, sometimes 18 players.